


A Sunless Garden

by Makioka



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: F/M, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 19:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2663333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/pseuds/Makioka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drained of all energy, Hilary becomes aware of something inexorable reaching out from the grave for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sunless Garden

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



> With thanks to MissM for her very swift fixing of my mistakes. Any that remain are my own.

In the same month Elaine died, there was a storm so violent that it felled the largest oak tree on the village green, taking a good part of the butcher's shop with it. Two days after that, Hilary didn't get out of bed. Bad things come in threes, her mother always used to say.

 

As it happened, Julian was a surprisingly good nurse - if of the wet handkerchief on the fevered brow school - quieter, more diligent than she would have expected, tender when he touched, and he remembered the little things - brushed out her hair and kept her well supplied with water. She thought that it took more energy out of him than it did of her, his worry never perfectly concealed, and she couldn’t forget that behind his fear lurked the spectre of a mother recently dead, and now her mysterious unexplainable weakness, the nightmares that haunted her sleep.

He was out the afternoon that she noticed the increasingly thick smell of gladioli in the room, a flower Hilary had always particularly disliked, clinging and thick, coating the inside of her mouth until every breath felt an effort. It was with more energy than she cared to think about that she managed to stand, grasped, swaying, at the bedpost. Dismayed, she looked down - it had only been a week, how could she be so weak? She’d had rheumatic fever as a child, could remember even now her aching bones and fretful discomfort. This reminded her of that -- only she felt no pain, just an overwhelming critical tiredness. She wanted nothing more than to be in bed but grim will propelled her onwards until she grasped the offending flowers, and with an act of will got the window opened and heaved them out.

She was asleep when Julian came home and crawled onto the bed beside her, pressed his face against her shoulder, breath warm through the thin cotton. His hot, febrile warmth irritated her beyond bearing, but she held her tongue. “Hilary?” he whispered. “Tell me you love me.” There was something in his voice, a concealed dreadful fear that she didn’t have the energy to respond to, couldn’t reassure him with conviction that everything would be fine. She moved her lips and the words came out, hollow and empty, space in there for dreadful things to reside.

Julian didn't move for a long moment and when he did, she felt oddly cold, exposed as though he had moved in more than just body. With a smooth ability she wouldn't have thought him capable of, he arranged her pillows a little higher, and refilled her water glass. "It won't be long now," he said, "I promise," and the tone of his voice invited a memory too weak to surface. He looked older, drawn as though he was tired as well, the fine bones in his face more distinct than ever, skin stretched a little papery over them.

She held onto that thought of relief for as long as she could, as she sunk deeper into lethargy and coldness, gathered her blanket closer and smelt again the ripe, sickly scent of decaying flowers.

 

When she next saw him, she felt a little brighter, a little more able to speak with authority. "Julian," she said. "Darling, I wish you wouldn't bring flowers in here anymore. They oppress my spirits. Especially not those gladioli."

"I only brought them once," he said stiffly. "They were the last in mother's greenhouse and I thought you would like them. The whole place has gone to rack and ruin but they were still flowering, just a few." He didn't mention that she'd thrown them out of a window in a sudden impetuous anger against their rotting scent, but that moment of sudden madness hung in the air between them.

"Perhaps a few fell behind the chest," she said vaguely, turning over her disquiet. How stupidly foolish she was becoming, trapped in this room as she was, divorced from health and her work, and she fretted again at the disquieting anger that kept blossoming in her as though it needed an outlet. Not Julian, though, not him. "Could you ring Doctor Lawrence and ask him to drop by when he gets a moment. I've had a thought.”

It wasn't so much that she needed another poking and prodding along the lines of the ones that she'd conducted on herself mentally and physically ten times over since this illness had begun, but this wearing on her nerves was new and made her feel uneasy. It had been one of her stock phrases to trot out when her patients complained of their nerves or neuralgia, that a healthy body meant a healthy mind and that a little brisk exercise would answer for half her cases. Did it follow, then, that a sick body entailed a sick mind? Was it that sickness that inclined her to answer yes to that question, a train of thought that made her head spin?

Dr Lawrence was a tonic in himself, though, took one look around the room and said to her with no pretense at playing the doctor "Good lord. No wonder you're sick. It's like a tomb in here."

She laughed, a little surprised to find she still could. Everything had been so sincere, so saturated in gloom, she'd forgotten that it wasn't so serious as all that, and Julian, dear that he was, had never made her laugh much. "It is rather," she said, and shrugged self-consciously as though the filmy gauze over the brightness of the windows and the mountain of blankets had been her doing. "I was rather hoping you'd had some news on those samples?"

"Nothing yet," he said. "I'll try jollying them on a little bit, if only because every second person I visit wants to know when Dr. Mansell will be back doing her rounds."

She smiled at the pleasantry and they talked shop for a little while. "I was thinking," she said, after his description of Mr. Robert's septicaemia (responding to treatment), "that perhaps it might be pernicious anemia."

The beauty of a junior doctor who was still a little awed at the prospect of diagnosing and treating patients and seeing the results entirely on their own, was that he almost forgot she was a patient. He immediately forgot about Mr. Roberts and his clumsiness with the secateurs and considered it for long moments, scanning her as though to begin a checklist. "The grey," she added, "was there beforehand." Vanity dictated she ignore the scattering, the doctor in her considered it as a possible symptom. "I experienced some difficulty two days ago while walking only as far as across the room, which was what made me consider it.

She could see his mind ticking away at the possibility, matching symptoms and discarding those that didn't fit. "You're right," he said. "You take the Lancet, of course, you know the Schilling test is decidedly popular. Naturally we'll hold on a little more but it might be no bad idea to consider it, though of course it'll mean a hospital stay."

"At this point, I'd consider anything," she said, and they shook hands quite naturally as he went and she sank back into oblivion. Her last drifting thought before darkness came was that she must ask Julian to take down the gauze. It irritated her quite unreasonably.

When she woke, Julian was there, asleep beside her in a chair, surprisingly severe in a white shirt, buttoned rather formally for him. It reminded her of something, but she couldn't say what. There was a starched quality to it, a briskness that brought the taste of antiseptic to her mouth. When she slept again, horrific dreams assailed her and fled when she woke, leaving her only with unsettling flashes of memory - a ridged brown heap of earth, dead petals strewn on a green grass bed, the touch of a cold hand in what she guessed was the second stage of rigor mortis on her cheek, that left her trembling, weakened and drained.

Nightmares, she told herself, were to be expected while she was in this state, and she breathed deeply for a second before, with slowly creeping conviction, she became aware that there was something in the bed beside her. A paralysing fear ran through her veins, icy and cold, as what she had taken for a jumbled heap of blankets tangled by her restlessness _moved_ beside her. It was with every ounce of rationality that she could conjure, every bit of the courage she prided herself on, that she turned to see what stared back at her.

And woke, from what had been a dream within a dream, her back soaked with sweat now, as she scrabbled uselessly among the blankets for something that wasn't there. At the end of the bed, though, there were smears on the sheets, and cautiously she lifted a foot, finding almost without surprise that there was mud on it. She had gone, it seemed, beyond the point of disbelief - bedridden as she was, she had crawled her way out of bed and into the garden, without Julian noticing or any remark being raised by it. In the room, once again, was the heavy scent of flowers, itchingly familiar, sweeter now than before as though they had reached the final stage of rot.

It was a mark, she thought, of her loneliness, that there was nobody she could call, nobody she could ask to trace the bones of her face and tell her if something was stirring, emerging forth from the chrysalis of her skin. She couldn't ask Tom Lawrence to do it, he'd think she was mad, and it was with a sudden, renewed grief that she thought of Lisa, the pain as fresh as though no time at all had passed. Julian she shrunk from. He was in pain, he was grieving for his mother still, despite the bad blood of years past. She couldn't torment him with this half-mad notion that something of Elaine had stayed behind or clawed its way forth in search of some new home, had sunk into her bones, infected her blood with something of what she was. Hilary had never believed in God and she still didn't, but a sudden certainty that this wasn’t natural suffused her, and she stuffed her knuckles in her mouth in an urge not to scream. Julian was there in an instant, awake now, glass of water in his hand, holding it to her lips. She couldn't tell if the water was contaminated or if it was the tang of fear in her mouth that sullied it, and was filled with sudden doubt.

It was this doubt that made her fear the most - if she could not trust Julian, whom _could_ she trust? The insidious thought arose - _he brought you the flowers_ \- and she remembered the steady tramp of his feet as he climbed the stairs in the weeks after Elaine's death, when every pilgrimage to her grave had brought him home silent. 'You brought it here,' she thought, quite clearly, as though the feverish hysteria of the last few days had receded and left only cold certainty in its wake. Another time she would have laughed at the dark age superstition that saturated the thought, the idea that some intangible part of the dead stayed behind, dismissed it as foolish thinking. Now, though, she had never been more convinced. "More things in heaven and earth," she murmured, and her lips cracked.

Julian stared at her uncomprehendingly. "Well, yes," he said, as though soothing her, and she remembered that heavy oppressive cave, as though something had lurked there, waiting for her, a menace incompatible with the modern electric lights. Something crawling in the dark, formless and expectant. If she'd ever felt old compared to Julian, that paled in the face of whatever it was that lurked in the damp, endless darkness.

When faced with her first dissection, Hilary had been unlucky enough to draw the short straw of the body that was just a little too ripe to be fit for purpose. Her fellow students had retched at the first incision and she'd felt inclined to do the same, a similar revulsion in her throat, but had struggled on, too proud to turn her head aside. Before her had been unveiled the immense mechanism of life, the delicate tracery of its veins, pathways, the sheer translucence even of dulled eyes, mysteries laid bare before her gaze, the gentle unravelling of life on her table. Since she could remember, it was what she had been looking for – that unbearable sacred intimacy of exposure and knowledge. The mystery had disappeared in seconds, of course, as the students butchered away, but the sense of wonder her remained. Whatever this was, it was intangible, but she recognised in it the fascination of the unknown, felt drawn to it, would not let it defeat her.

Julian came back over from fussing with the window, hovered his hand above her forehead as though he wanted to touch her but didn’t quite dare. Ducked his head in a quick impulsive gesture, and she closed her eyes, felt his gaze on her face. Wondered how altered she looked to his eyes, if he could see the changes. “Darling,” he said and finally touched her, traced her brow. “I’m afraid.” She knew then that whatever this was, whether he had brought it to her door or not, tracked it in with the graveyard dirt, that he had not meant to, that he was as much in the dark as she was, and the very relief of it brought unexpected tears to her eyes.

“So am I,” she whispered and kept her eyes closed until the threat of tears had departed, tried not to wonder what he saw as she lay there.

 

Having determined to treat the affair as she would any purely rational one, Hilary formed her plan of attack, feeling the comfort to be found in intending action. Her natural state was rebelling against the lassitude of brain and body that had suffused her for what felt like years, but, she realised with a kind of numb surprise, had now been ten days. It seemed evident to her that the key to the matter was to be found at night, in those moments where she succumbed to sodden dead sleep. So as night drew in, she called the maid in, requested coffee with calm confidence that admitted of no dispute and dearly wished for access to her dispensary. Julian had already gone to bed in the other room, since she saw no reason why her disturbed sleep should keep him awake also.

She managed with a great expenditure of effort to drag herself to the fire place and unhook the poker from its stand, contemplated asking the maid to phone the vicar and dismissed the idea with embarrassment, as though she could believe in a ghost but not the traditional cure. Whatever this was, it was her duty to resist it. The journey back to bed and to the light novel that she had been struggling to read was exhausting, and she was damp with exertion by the time she dropped back down. _All the better to fool it_ , a quiet internal voice added, and she closed her eyes and waited. She was not long disappointed.

When the door opened, the now familiar scent of the last of Elaine’s hothoused flowers came with it, the rotting musk overlying something deeper, older, dirtier;: the scent that wafted out when the seal on old tombs was broken, a final eddying gust of dead air. It moved closer in the darkness and Hilary felt her heart quicken in her chest, fear gripping her. She maintained her pose - feigning sleep and obliviousness of the _thing_ that stood above her, foul breath issuing from its mouth, and firmed her grip around the poker. As though drawn inexorably the figure drifted closer still.

It was with nothing but hope that Hilary swung the poker with every ounce of power she could muster and connected with something that sent a reverberation up her spine as though she had touched a live wire, shivering her teeth impossibly, a thin animal howl of pain rising to her lips.

In a flash the thing was back bending with remorseless precision to press its mouth against hers in a parody of a lover’s kiss, dank breath of the grave filling her lungs, as it sucked strength from her – and no wonder she had been so weak. It broke the embrace at last and rested its cheek on hers for a long moment.

“Help me,” it whispered and stumbled backwards. It was with the strength of pure fear that she fumbled the light beside her bed and revealed it for what it was.

Julian was there, the curve of his ribs caved in from her swing with the poker, and even through the soaked redness of his shirt she could see the movement of his bones knitting back together. Only it wasn’t Julian –there was something else. The thing that was half Julian, half Elaine, turned a blind dead gaze on her, devoid of recognition, a soul clawed back from grave peering out from eyes that did not belong to her.

Her mistake, she discovered, staring at the thing, had been to imagine it had ever wanted her at all. She’d glimpsed the truth and fondly imagined she knew what it was. Now she watched in sick wretched dismay, the taste of bile flooding her mouth, as whatever it was that wore Julian’s body folded its fingers around a hank of his hair, combed through it, and said in Julian’s voice:

“Don’t worry, darling. Mother’s home now.”


End file.
